Border more controlled than ever before

By Dane Schiller :
June 30, 2012
: Updated: June 30, 2012 11:45pm

"I believe 100% we need it," says Navy veteran Jesus Maldonado, 69, in regards to the U.S. Mexico border fence towering over his backyard in the Chihuahuita neighborhood on Tuesday, March 20, 2012, in El Paso. "Ever since they put that fence in, you can sleep," says Maldonado who could hear people on his roof at night who were trying to illegally enter the country. El Paso's historic neighborhood of Chihuahuita is safer according to residents who say the fence is keeping out undocumented immigrants and smugglers who sprinted across the border.

Photo By Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle

Jonathan Hinojoso, 14, Jessica Guerrero, 15, and Brianna Gonzalez, 9, use the slide in the playground at Chihuahuita Park, which sit against the U.S. Mexico Border fence on Tuesday, March 20, 2012, in El Paso.

A bank of floodlights illuminates the federal road where a Border Patrol agent drives along the Rio Grande on Sunday, March 18, 2012, in El Paso. In 1993, Operation Hold the Line began in the El Paso Sector by stationing agents in tight distance along the U. S. border. The number of people detained in El Paso dropped from 285,000 per year prior to Hold the Line compared to last year's 10,345 apprehensions.

EL PASO — A 22-foot-tall concrete and steel mesh fence towers over two girls swinging on monkey bars, their new playground forged by a 650-mile barrier and America's growing resolve to stare down undocumented immigrants, human smugglers and drug traffickers.

They play on the edge of a historic El Paso neighborhood known as Chihuahuita, where their generation is the first to know a truly fortified borderline. The $2.4 billion dollar barrier is equipped with spotlights, motion detectors and surveillance cameras, and watched by the largest Border Patrol in history.

It sends a message as tough as the steel mesh: the U.S. wants immigrants to get in line and use the front door.

But despite the political saber-rattling over immigration and Arizona's contested enforcement law – much of it struck down Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court — the number of undocumented immigrants caught sneaking over the border has dropped significantly for the first time in decades.

As a result, experts say, the clash over undocumented immigrants is shifting from the border to communities farther inside the United States. Staunch measures — such as the Arizona provision that allows police to request documentation from those they suspect are in the country illegally — amount to political backlash aimed at U.S. immigration enforcement.

“There doesn't seem to be the earlier concern that the border was pretty much unprotected,” said Nestor Rodriguez, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “The issues concerning immigration seem to be more about things happening in the interior,” such as requirements for a driver's license or if a child raised in the United States without papers should now be given new consideration.

In fact, so many people are being turned away from the border that agents in Texas who once caught hundreds of undocumented immigrants each night now catch just dozens or fewer. The Border Patrol, with a record $3.5 billion budget, caught 340,252 people sneaking into the United States last year — the lowest number since 1971 — compared with 1.6 million in 2000.

At the same time, the number of agents on duty increased from 10,000 in 2004 to more than 21,000 today.

“As long as there is a desire to come in, someone is going to figure out how to do it,” said Michael Przybyl, division chief of operations for the Border Patrol's El Paso Sector. “But it is much, much, much more difficult now, and our success is showing it.”

‘Freedom Wall'

The fence has riled emotions in deep South Texas, from farmers who had portions of their land swallowed by the government to the University of Texas at Brownsville, where it was demonized for being built through campus. But hundreds of miles away, it is just a part of Chihuahuita and other portions of the border, such as Arizona, where it stretches over desert and sand dunes, or California, where it plunges into the Pacific Ocean.

The Chihuahuita neighborhood where the girls play is the very spot where a few years ago undocumented immigrants sprinted into the United States in the night, scurried over rooftops of homes or hid under cars or in trash cans to beat the Border Patrol.

“It was like a cat-and-mouse game in the neighborhood streets. They'd yank open anybody's door and come inside,” recalled Fred Morales, a local historian who grew up here.

“I call it my freedom wall,” added Dolores Chacon, 60, a kindergarten teacher and ballet instructor who has lived in the same adobe house there that her grandparents built when they fled the Mexican Revolution a century ago. “We got our life back.”

But even with the bordered secured like never before, the successes do little to abate escalating angst over what do about the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in communities across the country.

The Department of Homeland Security has focused its immigration enforcement inside the U.S. largely on “removing criminal aliens and ... repeat immigration law violators, recent border entrants and immigration fugitives,” its own reports say.

Political efforts to come up with an overhaul of America's immigration policy have so far failed.

Gillian Christenson, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which enforces immigration laws in the interior of the United States, said the agency is doing what it can to remove undocumented immigrants who pose the greatest threat to public safety.

The agency has the resources to remove about 400,000 people a year, she said, adding, “We want to focus on removing the right 400,000 people, not the first 400,000 people we encounter.”

Braving the obstacles

Still, beyond the statistics, this Chihuahuita neighborhood, which has included the same families for generations, bears witness to the formidable changes. Stretches along the U.S. side of the border that were once lawless badlands are now locked down and almost as safe as many suburban streets.

As if to further prove the point, Przybyl, the Border Patrol operations chief, ticks off statistics from his smart phone: In one recent 24-hour period, there were 84 known crossing attempts, with 50 people caught, 30 turned back into Mexico, and four getting away — which some always do.

Those athletic, brazen and desperate enough to try to come across must first face the Rio Grande, which often is dry, then make their way across 150 yards of barren earth where the edges are covered with smooth sand and foot prints, evade radar and infrared sensors hooked to cameras that can read license plates from five miles away; sneak under stadium-style floodlights and finally climb a berm topped by a gravel road where Border Patrol vehicles rumble east and west.

Then, they have to jump the fence and run.

“I will never tell you no one is getting though,” Przybyl said. “Someone will always get through.”